Is it time for your Digital Diet?

Daniel Sieberg argues that many of us allow gadgets to dominate our
lives - here's how to make them work for you

By Daniel Sieberg

7:00AM GMT 05 Jan 2012

A friend told me recently that her five-year-old son was suffering night terrors. One night, she went into his room to comfort him, patting his head and soothing with gentle words. In his sleep, her son said: “Mummy, mummy, put your BlackBerry down. Put your BlackBerry down.”

If that’s not a wake-up call for all of us then I don’t know what is. Let’s hit the virtual pause button for a minute and consider what our digital lives have become.

Many of us now spend our days with our head in the high-tech “clouds.” We text and drive like it’s a matter of life and death, which, I’m sorry to report, it is. And then there’s that nagging voice telling us that despite our unprecedented connectedness, we sometimes feel more overwhelmed and, ironically, disconnected, than ever before.

While it’s easy to blame technology for taking us away from the people and things we love, in truth we’re often our own worst enemy.

As a quick barometer of your digital life, ask yourself these questions: Do you sometimes feel the urge to pull out your smartphone while someone else is talking to you? Have you ever realized that you were texting or reading email while your child was telling you about her day and later couldn’t remember her story? Have you ever felt that something hasn’t really happened until you post it online? Do you feel anxious if you’re offline for any length of time? Does a ringing phone trump everything else, including your dinner date?

And if this isn’t a picture of your own life, we all know someone for whom this is the everyday.

I’m guessing you grudgingly admitted a “yes” to at least one or two. I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve covered technology for several television networks over the past decade but in late 2009 while visiting family and friends I realised I had lost touch with the people I cared about in real life.

I’ve spent the past couple of years trying to streamline my digital intake, improve my relationships, and make technology work for me, not the other way around. I’ve worked to create a four-step 'digital diet’. It’s about illuminating our tech demands and dependence in the short term and instilling an over-arching awareness and strategy for the long term.

My digital diet begins with a brief detox. Spend a day or two without your technology. It’s not meant to torture you but to instill awareness of what you have been missing. Step two is to reboot and calculate your 'Virtual Weight Index’ - a formula that measures how weighed down you are by gadgets, emails, social networks and phone calls.

After that you are ready to reconnect but, I hope, with a new awareness and vigilance about how you spend your day. Consider when it starts, and, just as importantly, when it ends. Those company devices have gone from being a nifty distraction to an invisible tether. Set boundaries for when people can expect to hear from you. If you don’t, no one else will. Reestablish friendships. Make dates instead of just “liking” a friend’s photo on a social. Rediscover the art of conversation.

The final phase offers several steps that can help you gain that foundation of strength for your future digital life. There are lots of technologies, beyond the ones we use for communication, that can benefit your overall wellbeing. It could be something as simple as downloading Scrabble for your smartphone or getting in shape with something like the Wii Fit.

The diet is about seeing your technology in a whole new light. Loving it again, not wanting to put it in a blender. Going on a digital diet is also about reconnecting with people. It’s not a “digital fast” it’s about indulging in a healthy manner. No one is forcing you to become so overloaded and overwhelmed. There is a way forward and the answers are literally in the palm of your hands.

Daniel Sieberg’s The Digital Diet (Souvenir Press) is available for £10 from bookshops.